Magnetism makes silly putty fun again

The image above is a screen capture from a video clip where the black ooze gobbles up that rare-earth magnet. It’s actually a blob of Silly Putty which was slightly altered to add magnetic properties. [Mikeasaurus] grabbed some ferric iron oxide powder from an art supply store and donned gloves and a dust mask while massaging it into the silicone polymer. If you get the right mix of the two materials you end up with a flowing substance that performs mysteriously when exposed to a magnetic field.

Check out the video after the break to see some of the tricks that [Mikeasaurus] can do. The putty really looks like it has a life of its own. It will stretch a remarkable distance to get close to the magnets (amorphous stretch). If left in contact with one it will fully engulf it and then form an orb.

Now, is there any way to use this with electromagnetic fields to build a morphing robot?

@raidscsi You can actually grind gears in a transmission. You see they actually used to make transmissions that you had to shift manually, now I don’t mean from park to drive I mean from first to second and so on and so fourth while your driving down the road and there was this third pedal all the way on the left that you had to step on to disengage the engine from the transmission before switching gears it’s called the clutch. So as it turns out if you have a car with a standard transmission its easy to grind your gears all you have to do is let off the clutch with the gear partially engaged and you get to hear the most painful noise you will ever hear your transmission make.

Funny to see this the day after I learned you’re not supposed to glue supermagnets with JB Weld (steel-bearing epoxy), because it will spread to cover the magnet. Which is (usually) not what you intended.

this video seems sped up. i wondwer how the material could be made to move faster. it looks like it is already saturated. furthermore has anyone seen magnetized particles suspended in a solution like this?

anyone remember gak from the 90s?
they had all kinda
glow in the dark gak
a whole rainbow of colors
gak with styrofoam balls
and yes, even magnetic gak
i found the little container of it years later, it became a black paste that could stain ANYTHING

@matt – “the most painful noise you will ever hear your transmission make” is not that of grinding gears but the kind of THUMP SSsccccrraaaaaaappppeee kerCHUNK noise as it falls off. Far more painful, both psychologically and financially.

was in my friend’s trans am when he dropped his tranny. he had a speed shifter and down-shifted from 5th to reverse when he missed 4th gear!! Nastiest sounds I ever heard a car make followed by the nastiest sounds I ever heard him make.

How strange, every manual transmission car i have driven has been specifically designed so that if reverse is directly under the top gear you cannot physically shift from that gear straight down to reverse for this reason. Though i have seen cars with very worn gearboxes that you were able to do this on.